Welcome to two new Texas-based appellate blogs: Circuit Splits and Texas Appellate Watch!

I’ve recently come across two new appellate blogs with a Texas connection. If these strike your fancy, you may want to add them to your reading list.

Circuit Splits

Newly minted attorney Nicholas Wagoner has hit the ground running with Circuit Splits a blog focused on the U.S. Supreme Court. Well, to be more precise, it’s focused on cases in lower courts that show the kind of circuit split that might tempt the high court to grant review. The updates also flow through to the blog’s Twitter feed.

It’s reminiscent, both in name and content, of the “Split Circuits” blog by Professor Benjamin Spencer, which has been running since 2005.

It’s good to have multiple eyes on the same problem, and the early output is impressive. More importantly, the authors of Circuit Splits makes an effort (in the right-hand column) to break the cases down by circuit of origin and by topic — which is, after all, what a reader would care about. Will that scale? I don’t know. But I’m glad that the new blog is already focused on that key problem.

Texas Appellate Watch

The other new blog is Texas Appellate Watch, started by Scott P. Stolley and Richard B. Phillips Jr. of Thompson & Knight.

The emphasis so far is on the Texas Supreme Court (its weekly orders are noted) and the Fifth Circuit. The authors also pass along some articles they have written on more general appellate topics (like what words to avoid in a brief).